How to attain or restore your Top 5 rankings in Google search, while also increasing the chances of your site appearing as a Featured Snippet result above the fold:
Guide type: actionable
Target audience: websites that lost (or would like to gain) top positions and/or featured snippets visibility in Google following a string of recent Google search algorithm updates
Google has recently confirmed its March 7th search algorithm update. Interestingly, this algorithm update was primarily focused on relevance and not necessarily on quality.
Search Engine Journal has just published an article explaining John Mueller’s thoughts on relevance in connection to the March 7th Google algorithm update.
Here is our synopsis of what John Muller had to say in regards to the above update:
You can have a quality website that becomes less relevant overtime — this could result in a loss of organic search visibility in Google.
Now, John Mueller, predictably and naturally, does not give you the specifics or tell you how to make your “quality website” more relevant other than suggesting you get feedback from your users on how to improve, but never fear! This guide offers five actionable steps on how to make your website more relevant.
But first, here is a more detailed explanation on the March 7th update from Search Engine Journal:
First, Mueller clears up some confusion by explaining that most of Google’s algorithm updates are focused on relevance. If rankings were affected by last month’s update, it’s not an indication that a site’s content is of low quality.
A lot of sites lose relevance over time, Mueller says, regardless of how high quality the content is. When it comes to figuring out how to make a site more relevant, Mueller suggests getting feedback from users about what you could be doing differently to improve the site overall.
So, what is relevance and how to make your website more relevant?
Relevance in the eyes of Google is how well a given page on a given website answers the search query of a user. The reason we mention a “website” and not just a page, is because a website’s overall topical authority and relevance certainly play a role in determining the relevance of any given page.
That being said, here are the top 5 steps to relevance and hence visibility in Google aka yours and your company’s path to great riches! 😉
- Publish fresh, original, highly relevant, engaging, and compelling content to delight your audience
- Keeping your evergreen cornerstone content evergreen
- Make important information and data in your articles easy to find
It’s crucial to keep your website’s content, fresh, original unique, and relevant.
Whenever you provide another compelling and thematically-relevant article to delight your audience, you are also making the other pages of your website more relevant, especially the ones you reference or link to internally.
That’s right, not letting your website content get stale and providing ongoing thought leadership is the key. — You can achieve this by publishing extremely helpful (practically useful 10X content) and/or thought-provoking, compelling and highly-engaging articles.
Don’t just simply refresh that old, static, evergreen content on your website. Update it for real! Keep it fresh, relevant and useful! And oh yeah, update the date of the article, after you are done with the refresh. This will help improve the click-through rates in Google and enhance your page’s relevance.
Don’t make the user scroll down like crazy to find the key information.
Prioritize the placement of the key facts and make relevant info easy to find. Not only it will help prevent unnecessary bounces, but when executed well, this can also help you win that coveted featured snippet visibility in Google. — That’s one of my specialties, by the way! 😉